Monthly Development Update – 28th of February, 2014

I have returned from my Australian travels, somewhat more relaxed and excited about 2014 to come. Next week I will be heading over to hang out with the team and get down all of our plans for the game over the coming twelve months. But for now, let's talk about what has been happening in development over the last month or so.

Firstly, the engine, we have now got hundreds of testers from the community playing and testing and providing us with invaluable feedback on the closed beta server. We're about to invite a new wave of testers to coincide with the upcoming patch - and begin the whole process again.

Every wave of new testers bringing fresh eyes to the content gives us a new set of bugs or suggested design improvements.

The upcoming 18.7 patch (targeted for Tuesday next week on the closed beta server) has a fairly extensive list of system changes:

- Parry will be replaced by a new defensive stat called Deflect. Deflect will make incoming hits glance. Instead of dealing 100% damage, a glancing hit will only deal 50% of the damage. Glance chance will cap out at 15%. Deflection is NOT considered a melee special and will work on any incoming weapon attack.

- We will enable everyone to see friendly nano programs in their opponent's NCU. This is to level the playing field for people who do not have access to 3rd party programs which provide this information.

- We will disable the ability to decline inspects. We fully expect this to lead to an increase in the number of exploit reports that we receive and a decrease in the actual exploiting.

- All Signet of the apocalypse rings will no longer have a special action, because of this change, a few nano changes have been made:

Enforcers, Keepers and Shades will get a root removal nano.

Doctors will get a DOT removal nano.

Soldiers will get their one more hit healing nano properly fixed, it will provide a 10 000 HP healing, giving the soldier 7 seconds to finish his battle before his health is set to 1. This is meant to be a last resort nano formula to buy you a little more time to turn certain defeat in to a possible victory.

Adventurers have gotten all their mezz nano formulas revamped. The Rubi-Ka mezz will be a proper mezz when the adventurer is in the leet form. The AoE mezz will remain a tool to pull enemies with, and can only be used on monsters who are not attacking the adventurer. However, if other monsters in the vicinity of this monster are attacking you, they will get their aggro list wiped.

Enforcers will get a Charge nano, which will stun their target while the enforcer sprints to it.

Shades will get the ability to hide in the middle of combat.

Keepers will get their reversed knockback to tractor enemies to their location.

All pet professions will get a nano to clear out hostile nanos from their pet's ncu.

- Items that used to be possible to equip with grid armor - prior to the introduction of the nano focus level bit - will be possible to equip with grid armor again.

- Grid armor will be opened up to the Shadowlands and will require Break& Entry instead of Mat. Crea.

And the obligatory nerf:

- Grid armor will no longer provide nano resistance.

Alright guys, thanks for listening. Hopefully once we have had our planning meeting, Genele will have all sorts of juicy plans to share with you next month!